Record of the Day: Cecil Taylor Unit, “The Eight”

Cecil Taylor Unit
“The Eight” (Cd HatHut/Hatology 622)

Looking closely at sculptures such as Henry Moore’s Seated Woman or Michelangelo’s Pietà, it seems truly incredible that those perfectly smooth surfaces, whose softness seems to retain immense quantities of light within them, were obtained through the violence of chisels and hammer blows.
The contrast between the brutality of the gesture in the clash with the material and the poetry that is born from this force is found identical every time.
every time you listen to the music of Cecil Taylor, a great artist who manages to extract beauty by force from the living flesh of sound, tearing it through a use of the piano that alternates rarefied moments with sudden lava flows of impressive violence and primordial strength; it is no coincidence that Art Lange, in the liner notes of this album, compares Taylor’s music to Nature itself, a true “rite of creation that accepts the paradox at the very moment in which it tries to transcend it”.

Listening to this beautiful album recorded live in Fribourg in 1981 and re-released by the Swiss label HatHut is
definitely challenging but worth your full attention; also on stage are William Parker on double bass, Jimmy Lyons on alto sax and Rashid Bakr on drums.
The ritual atmosphere that immediately pervades the very long composition (over fifty-eight minutes) “Call It the Eight” involves the musicians starting from the initial song, with its mysterious and ancestral sounds; soon the melody that Taylor hints at on the piano blazes like a fire through the entire instrumental fabric of the group and in a few minutes we find ourselves in a more heated climate, where the obsessive insistence of the piano chords and clusters find an answer in the continuous rhythmic fragmentation of the percussions, saturated with adrenaline, while the sax and bass continuously charge energy through the accumulation of tireless phrases.

The tension of the music is often at the limits of what is sustainable but you remain enchanted in front of such expressive force, at the same time visceral and intellectual, that takes heart and brain to push them beyond the limits, on roads not yet marked on the maps. At the end you are exhausted but certain of having lived a unique musical experience; with a hint of envy for those who were present that evening in the room.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.